“My legs ached and my neck was stiff. But with each defeated kite, hope grew in my heart, like snow collecting on a wall, one flake at a time.” (page 64)
“I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire. I can still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought.” (page 3)
~both quotes from Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner
The day after he killed Ikemefuna, Okonkwo “felt like a drunken giant walking with the limbs of a mosquito.” (Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, page 63)
"The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand." Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, chapter 2
And in the autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors. Thomas Hardy
“He saw Donna Lucrezia appear, in a black cloud of silks paneled with gold brocade, like a thunderstorm slotted with stripes of lightning.” (pg. 177) Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire
"At its harbor end, the city tapers to a rounded promontory which is packed solid with beautiful homes, lined up one after the other along straight, shady streets like oversized books on a crowded shelf" (83; Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent).
"Times Square is incredible. You've never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of buildings are given over to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It's like a storm on an electronic sea" (143; Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent).
"In the cold of winter, when the ground lay frozen, [the trees] had sung their frosty ballads of years gone by. Or on a muggy, sweat-drenched day, their leaves has rippled softly, lazily, like restless green fingers strumming at a guitar, exhoing their epic tales." --Mildred D. Taylor, "Song of the Trees"
"I felt emotionally anesthetized yet hyperaware, as if I had fled into a bunker deep inside my skull and was peering out at the wreckage around me through a narrow, armored slit." (page 257)
Finally, the headmistress puts down her pen. She points to a chair on the other side of the desk. "Sit." There is no "please." No "would you be so kind." All in all, I'm feeling as welcome as a dose of cod-liver oil.
A Great and Terrible Beauty, By Libba Bray, Page 40.
Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it's a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth. Page 388 The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
"He made our country boys look like the hand-me-down socks Mama brought home, all full of their darns and mends. Page 4 The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
"Sadly, Aringarosa now saw, the Vatican had ruined the building by constructing two huge alumninum telescope domes atop the roof, leaving this once dignified edifice looking like a proud warrior wearing a couple of party hats."
"It was a skillful and steady incision, like drawing a curved line with a pencil across the crown of the head, a fluid and graceful curve. In this manner he was able to peel back the dead man's face as though it were the skin of a grapefruit or an orange and turn his forehead inside out so that it rested against his nose." (page 56)
" The method in studying any of these instruments was more or less the same. The teacher began by playing something, and then the students tried to play it back. On occasion we sounded like a band of animals at the zoo.
This Kimono belonging to the Geisha named Mameha - whom I'd never heard of at the time - was a work of art. Weaving its way from hem up to the waist was a beautiful vine made of heavily lacquered threads bunched together like a tiny cable and sewn into place. It was a part of the fabric, yet it seemed like and actual vine growing there, I had the feeling I could take it in my fingers, if I wished, and tear it away like a weed from the soil. (page 83)
"He moved like a bird: flickering, darting, flttering. Someone muse that when this one was done with horseracing, no one would remember Man o' War." pg.142
"It was a large store and I did not like to go into it because its brightness was cold, like sunlight on distant ice." Chaim Potok - My Name Is Asher Lev (page 104)
"Since the terrible night of the ants, Mother had been creeping her remorse in flat-footed circles around me without ever speaking of it, wearing her guilt like the swollen breasts of a nursing mother. So far I had refused to suckle and give her relief, but I kept close by." (Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible page 345-346)
"But the bees stayed there, like planes on a runway not knowing they'd been cleared for takeoff. They crawled on their stalk legs around the cured perimeters of the glass as if the world had shrunk to that jar." pg. 28 -Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret life of Bees"
"I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking-a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless." -Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
"I think he's going to ignore me, but then he answers by holding out his hands. They are shaking as though they are in their own tiny earthquake. He's done it, finally. Twenty-three years of determined drinking and he's destroyed his ability to play the violin."
The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger Pg. 224
"There was my mother, my sober, somber mother, dresses in a T-shirt and a pair of those tight, shiny knee pants, pedaling like a maniac." (Ellen Wittlinger Hard Love, pg. 88)
"Rain, steam, and smoke were swirling all around, so the planes looked as if they were moving forward in an uneasy dream. Hulan waved harder and harder, tears streaming. The planes raced down the runway. And then she was waving furiously, crazily, like a wounded bird, as if this effort and all her wishes and hopes could lift them up safely, one after the other, and send them to victory." (p.235; Tan, Amy, The Kitchen God's Wife)
"The skin of his face and hands was almost as white as the tablecloth drawn tightly over the bones, and the veins showed like blue branches in his face and on the top of his hands" (Chaim Potok The Chosen, page 123)
I am average," I wrote, ' because the cry of individuality flows confidently through my blood, with little attention drawn to itself, like the still power of an applie pie sitting in an open window to cool. Page 10 from In the Pleasure of my Company Steve Martin
In all of these spots, I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow.
They never look at every thing, they do what is called -glancing-, which is the sme word for bumping something off and carying on in almost the same direction, e.g, when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. (Mark Haddon - Curious Incidnet of a Dog in the Night-time page 140)
"Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest." (pg. 22) The Da Vinci Code
"I remember biting him, pushing him, I don't know what. Then I began to run. Like a giant who is all powerful, he reached out and grabbed the end of my long brown hair. He yanked it hard and that brought me down onto my knees infront of him. That was my first missed escape, the hair, the woman's long hair." (Page 1)
"What makes the hair on your arms rise, your palms sweat, the breath catch in your chest like a wild thing caged?" (Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, page 86)
"On guard at night, watching the dark, Sorcerer would see PFC Weatherby start to smile, then topple backward, then make a funny jerking motion with his hand. Like a hitchhiker, Sorcerer thought. A poor bum who couldn't catch a ride." (pg 75)
"A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn't been good to him, that he'd become homeless and destitute." Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (246)
"I felt like a soldier trying to sleep in the trenches the night before a major battle. And that wasn't too far off. In Kabul, fighting kites was a little like going to war." Kite Runner - Khaled Housseini (50)
"Below us, Wazir Akbar Khan's white walled, flat-topped housed gleamed in the sunshine, the laundry hanging on clotheslines in their yards stirred by the breeze to dance like butterflies." (Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, page 91)
"The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him."(Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, page 430) Rhiannon S.
"I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumors of the future. Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of flesh, these are signs, there are things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own." (Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale page 73)
"Still, she would not let me touch her. She flittered nervously from the shower curtain to the towel rack, like a bird trapped in a cage. I told her I'd be downstairs stuffing my face and that she should join me, and then closed the door and left."
"Love ached in me more than if I had been with them all the time. It was like a secret wound that I had kept covered for six years. And now that I bared it, it hurt."(Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers,pg. 242)
"I can hear him in my head. And i know he's right. He didn't hit me, the first time. He just held onto my upper arm so tight that the mark of his fingerprints was like a tattoo, a black sun with four small moons revolving around it."
"Papa has seen shattered TV sets lying all over like garbage and tangles of cassette tape hanging in trees, swaying in the autumn breeze like sinister wreaths." [Latifa My Forbidden Face Pg.35]
“You put the film up on the viewing box in the hallway and pointed with the eraser end of his pencil to the pictures of Baba’s cancer, like a cop showing mug shot of the killers to the victim’s family.”
"Dad told us we were having something special for dessert, a flaming ice cream cake. The waiter wheeled out a tray with cake on it. The flames ahd a slow, watery movement. Rolling up into the air like ribbons."
“In China, everybody dreamed about Kweilin. . . When I saw the hills, I laughed and shuddered at the same time. The peaks looked like giant fried fish heads trying to jump out of a vat of oil.”
“But some things I can remember very clearly: the heaviness of her hair, the firmness of her hand when she held mine, the way she could peel an apple all in one long curly piece so that it lay in my hand like a flat yellow snake.”
But it takes me a long time to realize that I'm the one who has receded. It takes me a long time to make my way beyond my lie, and it's like being caught in a dream, going around and around, replaying the same scene until i get it right. A Gracious Plenty - Sheri Reynolds (124)
"A girl is like a young tree...You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is only way to grow strong and straight." (Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, page 191)
The Things they Carried Tim O'brien "He was a witness,like God, or like the Gods,Who look in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them."
"Nell Hawkin's eyes seem to see me for the first time. Her voice is high and scratchy as tree braches knocking against a pane in the wind." Libba Bray,"Rebel Angels"(page 234)
"Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes it shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore" -ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Their Eyes Were Watching God (p. 191)
And i loved our life, the longs stretches of tedium and small pleasures that marked most of our time together. Our life was like a connect-the-dots drawing, and those were the lines, the bad things only the haphazard arrangement of dots they connected.
"When he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty inside, nothing more than an involucre, like the slough of certain insects which one finds on the banks of swamps, held by a thread to the stones and shaken by the wind." Pg. 42 Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
"Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction." Primo Levi, Survival in Aushwitz pg. 7
"Prior to the Clutter mystery, the four cases cited were the sum of Dewey's experience with murder, and measured against the case confronting him, were as squalls preceding a hurricane." -pg 152
"I can't say my charm was at full throttle when I strolled by Elizabeth, but had she been at the other end of the street, so that I was walking eastward with the sun behind me, squintless and relaxed and perhaps in dusky silhouette, my own charisma would have swirled out of me like smoke from a hookah." (page 30)
"There were four curbs in all and each step down was like the dunking of a Salem witch." (page 164)
-Both from The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
So now I only ran in my dreams. In them, there was always something awful about to happen, or there was something I'd forgotten, and my legs felt like jelly, not strong enough to hold me. Whatever else varied, the ending was the same, a finish line i could never reach, no matter how many miles i put behind me.
"Mommy put us to bed each night like slabs of meat, laying us out three and four to a bed, one with his head to the headboard, the next with his feet to the headboard, and so on." The Color of Water by James McBride pg. 10
"As they walked in daylight or under the stars, they felt as if they were scrambling along the top of a wall so high that the towns of Italy, glittering below them in the warm summer air, were places in a children's book or a fairy tale."
"There was a thing in Dad's voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight patterns, made the ear want to follow the mind's eye to see."
Ray Bradbury- Something Wicked This Way Comes- pg.36
"One half of my face ws shut like a salted snail, while the other half was held open in an attempt to see." (page 16) Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterman
Jace flung the dagger. It struck the demon's bony rib cage and stuck there. The demon barely seemed to notice; it only kept moving, inexonerable as death. City of Ashes-Cassandra Clare pg 354-5 The other one was pg 190, I forgot to put it on there.
The blind inmates advanced like archangels surrounded by their own splendor, they thudded into the obstacle with their weapons upright as they had been instructed but the beds did not move, no doubt the strength of this brave vanguard was not much greater than that of the weaklings who came behind and by now could scarcely hold their lances, like someone who carried a cross on his back and now has to wait to be raised up on it.
If Kyle was dead, she would know it. She would feel it deep down, and the feeling would be tangilbe, like getting hit in the stomach. Maybe they had a special connection, maybe all mothers shared it with their children.
"...the head of each was completely encased in cotton, a swollen cocoon twice the size of an ordinary blown-up balloon, and the cotton, because it had been sprayed with a glossy substance, twinkled like Christmas-tree snow."
"There's nothing to see but whirling quickness and a hint of something else, a baby spinning in the mass, leaning out from it to wave, and spinning around again, like a globe, his dark hair flying off like wheat in wind."
"Tears are streaking down her cheeks. I put my arms around her, and she's back, my wife, Clare, safe and sound, on the shore at last after the shipwreck, weeping like a little girl whose mother is waving to her from the deck of the fondering boat."
The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger (page 342)
If someone like Pete Schoening was the equivalent of a major-league baseball star, my fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of pretty decent small-town softball players who’d bribed their way into the World Series.
Gran hadn't changed that much;her face looked just the same as I remembered it. The skin was soft and withered, bent into a thousand tiny creases that clung gently to the bone underneath. Like a dried apricot,but with a puff of thick white hair standing out in a cloud around it.
"His father was stubborn, just as he was, and had feelings like the bristles of a brush that scraped anyone who came too close." Romiette and Julio by Sharen Draper page 169
The monster's shadow passed in front of the shop. I could smell the thing - a sickening combination of wet sheep wool and rotten meat ant that wierd sour body odor only mosters have, like a skunk that's been living off Mexican food.
-Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters
In the half-light the big empty rooms they passed through on thier way to the roof looked as deserted as stage sets, the white-draped furniture looming up out of the dimness like icebergs through fog. -City of Bones
"The town hall stood like a giant ham-fisted youth, too big for his age." p. 169 "He had his first bout (fistfight)when he was eleven years old and skinny as a whittled broom handle." p. 187 "When Max heard the news, his body felt like it was being screwed up into a ball, like a page littered with mistakes." p. 194 -all from The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
"The jar in her hand seemed to glow orange, as if there were an unearthly fire inside it. There was a faint sound like a cross between a distant scream and the buzz of a hive of disgruntled bees." The Pig Scrolls, page 60 by Paul Shipton
"Sibyl peeked inside the hut. It provided some shelter from the wind, which was as bitter as an unripe lemon with an attitude problem." ~The Pig Scrolls by Paul Shipton-- page 69
"I popped my head around the door, his brown hair was still long and straggly, but at least it no longer looked like a weekend getaway for an assortment of minibeasts." ~The Pig Scrolls by Paul Shipton page 71
"It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears." "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker
"When Dad came down from his room, he found me sitting in the middle of a sea of splintered wood and snapped strings, like a boat carrying music had crashed on a rocky shore." Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, pg. 346
136 comments:
“My legs ached and my neck was stiff. But with each defeated kite, hope grew in my heart, like snow collecting on a wall, one flake at a time.” (page 64)
“I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire. I can still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought.” (page 3)
~both quotes from Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner
The day after he killed Ikemefuna, Okonkwo “felt like a drunken giant walking with the limbs of a mosquito.” (Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, page 63)
"The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand." Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, chapter 2
And in the autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors. Thomas Hardy
Streaming with perspiration, we swarmed up the rope, and coming into the blast of cold air, gasped like men plunged into icy water. Joseph Conrad
“He saw Donna Lucrezia appear, in a black cloud of silks paneled with gold brocade, like a thunderstorm slotted with stripes of lightning.” (pg. 177)
Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire
"The bed was like a pool table with sheets" (259; Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent).
"At its harbor end, the city tapers to a rounded promontory which is packed solid with beautiful homes, lined up one after the other along straight, shady streets like oversized books on a crowded shelf" (83; Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent).
"Times Square is incredible. You've never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of buildings are given over to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It's like a storm on an electronic sea" (143; Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent).
"Every house looked like a cross between a wedding cake and a state capitol building" (p. 151; Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent).
"On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray sculptured stones."
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, p. 2
"Over in the tank the minnows shiver in their black bodies like a whole school of commas facing us through the glass."
Mary Karr--The Liar's Club,Chapter 6, p.2.
"In the cold of winter, when the ground lay frozen, [the trees] had sung their frosty ballads of years gone by. Or on a muggy, sweat-drenched day, their leaves has rippled softly, lazily, like restless green fingers strumming at a guitar, exhoing their epic tales."
--Mildred D. Taylor, "Song of the Trees"
"It lay on the earth like a broken vase of red flowers, and even death could not mar its beauty." - James Hurst, "The Scarlet Ibis"
"Because horror on Earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained"
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
(page 186)
"I felt emotionally anesthetized yet hyperaware, as if I had fled into a bunker deep inside my skull and was peering out at the wreckage around me through a narrow, armored slit." (page 257)
~ Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air
Finally, the headmistress puts down her pen. She points to a chair on the other side of the desk. "Sit." There is no "please." No "would you be so kind." All in all, I'm feeling as welcome as a dose of cod-liver oil.
A Great and Terrible Beauty, By Libba Bray, Page 40.
"It was like a genie, wafting purple and smoky from the lamp, Bobby's voice, or perfume when you took the glass stopper out of the bottle." (page 3)
"It was like a twister cloud; it rose suddenly from nothing into a moving thing that blew the roof off, black and strong." (page 5, on Bobby's rage)
-Black and Blue, by Anna Quindlen.
Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it's a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth.
Page 388
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
"Twice she disappeared in the fogged billows, then gradually reemerged lik a dream rising up frome the bottom of the night."(Page 67)
The Secret Life Of Bees By: Sue Monk Kidd
"He made our country boys look like the hand-me-down socks Mama brought home, all full of their darns and mends.
Page 4
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
"Sadly, Aringarosa now saw, the Vatican had ruined the building by constructing two huge alumninum telescope domes atop the roof, leaving this once dignified edifice looking like a proud warrior wearing a couple of party hats."
Dan Brown-The Da Vinci Code-pg.162
"It was a skillful and steady incision, like drawing a curved line with a pencil across the crown of the head, a fluid and graceful curve. In this manner he was able to peel back the dead man's face as though it were the skin of a grapefruit or an orange and turn his forehead inside out so that it rested against his nose." (page 56)
from Snow Falling On Cedars by David Guterson
" The method in studying any of these instruments was more or less the same. The teacher began by playing something, and then the students tried to play it back. On occasion we sounded like a band of animals at the zoo.
(Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
Page 142)
"Remy held up the keystone like a trophy."
The Da Vinci Code, By Dan Brown, pg. 385.
After this she looked as if she'd fallen face-first into a bin of rice flour, for her whole face was ghastly white. (page 71)
From Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
This Kimono belonging to the Geisha named Mameha - whom I'd never heard of at the time - was a work of art. Weaving its way from hem up to the waist was a beautiful vine made of heavily lacquered threads bunched together like a tiny cable and sewn into place. It was a part of the fabric, yet it seemed like and actual vine growing there, I had the feeling I could take it in my fingers, if I wished, and tear it away like a weed from the soil. (page 83)
From Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
"He moved like a bird: flickering, darting, flttering. Someone muse that when this one was done with horseracing, no one would remember Man o' War." pg.142
"Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper." (page 428)
-Arthur Golden, "Memoirs of a Geisha"
"Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper." (page 428)
-Arthur Golden, "Memoirs of a Geisha"
"It was a large store and I did not like to go into it because its brightness was cold, like sunlight on distant ice."
Chaim Potok - My Name Is Asher Lev (page 104)
" Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover". (Albom, Mitch pg.6)
"Since the terrible night of the ants, Mother had been creeping her remorse in flat-footed circles around me without ever speaking of it, wearing her guilt like the swollen breasts of a nursing mother. So far I had refused to suckle and give her relief, but I kept close by." (Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible page 345-346)
"But the bees stayed there, like planes on a runway not knowing they'd been cleared for takeoff. They crawled on their stalk legs around the cured perimeters of the glass as if the world had shrunk to that jar."
pg. 28
-Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret life of Bees"
"In the moonlight, her pale skin glows white as a bone."
Pg. 373
-A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
"I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking-a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless."
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Dinner is a dis mail affair. Everyone is trying so very hard to be bright and smiling, as if we are posing for an advert.
- (Libba Bray ) Rebel Angels
"I think he's going to ignore me, but then he answers by holding out his hands. They are shaking as though they are in their own tiny earthquake. He's done it, finally. Twenty-three years of determined drinking and he's destroyed his ability to play the violin."
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger Pg. 224
"A Greek Philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul."
- Chaim Potok "The Chosen"; pg. 74
"Our only kiss was like a beautiful gasoline rainbow."
Lovely Bones
By: Alice Sebold
pg. 38
"It was like he'd traveled back in time, to a place where he wouldn't let himself feel a thing." (pg. 190)
"Black and Blue" By: Anna Quindlen
"There was my mother, my sober, somber mother, dresses in a T-shirt and a pair of those tight, shiny knee pants, pedaling like a maniac." (Ellen Wittlinger Hard Love, pg. 88)
"Rain, steam, and smoke were swirling all around, so the planes looked as if they were moving forward in an uneasy dream. Hulan waved harder and harder, tears streaming. The planes raced down the runway. And then she was waving furiously, crazily, like a wounded bird, as if this effort and all her wishes and hopes could lift them up safely, one after the other, and send them to victory."
(p.235; Tan, Amy, The Kitchen God's Wife)
"The skin of his face and hands was almost as white as the tablecloth drawn tightly over the bones, and the veins showed like blue branches in his face and on the top of his hands" (Chaim Potok The Chosen, page 123)
I am average," I wrote, ' because the cry of individuality flows confidently through my blood, with little attention drawn to itself, like the still power of an applie pie sitting in an open window to cool.
Page 10 from In the Pleasure of my Company
Steve Martin
In all of these spots, I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow.
-memoirs of a geisha
" I staired at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines."
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones,(18)
They never look at every thing, they do what is called -glancing-, which is the sme word for bumping something off and carying on in almost the same direction, e.g, when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. (Mark Haddon - Curious Incidnet of a Dog in the Night-time page 140)
It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils. (Mark Haddon - Curious incident of a dog in the night-time page 17)
"Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest." (pg. 22) The Da Vinci Code
"The kitchen had a leak coming from two corners. You could tell this house was like an orphan, no family to love it."
The Kitchen God's Wife (page 207)
"I remember biting him, pushing him, I don't know what. Then I began to run. Like a giant who is all powerful, he reached out and grabbed the end of my long brown hair. He yanked it hard and that brought me down onto my knees infront of him. That was my first missed escape, the hair, the woman's long hair." (Page 1)
Lucky by Alice Sebold
"What makes the hair on your arms rise, your palms sweat, the breath catch in your chest like a wild thing caged?"
(Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, page 86)
"On guard at night, watching the dark, Sorcerer would see PFC Weatherby start to smile, then topple backward, then make a funny jerking motion with his hand.
Like a hitchhiker, Sorcerer thought. A poor bum who couldn't catch a ride." (pg 75)
-In The Lake of The Woods by Time O'Brien
"A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn't been good to him, that he'd become homeless and destitute."
Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (246)
"I felt like a soldier trying to sleep in the trenches the night before a major battle. And that wasn't too far off. In Kabul, fighting kites was a little like going to war."
Kite Runner - Khaled Housseini (50)
"Below us, Wazir Akbar Khan's white walled, flat-topped housed gleamed in the sunshine, the laundry hanging on clotheslines in their yards stirred by the breeze to dance like butterflies." (Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, page 91)
"The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him."(Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, page 430)
Rhiannon S.
I was having trouble breathing, as though the oxygen were leaving the room
A Separate Peace (pg 45)
The Camerlengo shuddered when he looked into the tomb, his shoulders dropping like weights
Dan Brown - Angels And Demons
(pg 342)
"I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumors of the future. Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of flesh, these are signs, there are things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own."
(Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale page 73)
"Still, she would not let me touch her. She flittered nervously from the shower curtain to the towel rack, like a bird trapped in a cage. I told her I'd be downstairs stuffing my face and that she should join me, and then closed the door and left."
Lucky, by Alice Sebold, p. 57
"It makes me slow down and sad to think about my mama's mama's house. All the time was like a record you play on the wrong speed."
Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons, p.60
"Her eyes are wild as she whips around and scans the crowded streets like she's looking for a lost child."
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, page 7
"Love ached in me more than if I had been with them all the time. It was like a secret wound that I had kept covered for six years. And now that I bared it, it hurt."(Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers,pg. 242)
"He walked seabiscuit through the masses of shouting fans to the winner's circle. The horse was strutting like a prizefighter."
- From Laura Hillebrand's Seabiscuit
"I can hear him in my head. And i know he's right. He didn't hit me, the first time. He just held onto my upper arm so tight that the mark of his fingerprints was like a tattoo, a black sun with four small moons revolving around it."
Black and Blue, by Anne Quindlen, p.5
"As Faukman read down the list, he looked like a man who had just discovered the earth was actually flat."
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, page 163
"It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like a chicken."
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, p. 2
"Wilmer Lee was like a dog with a bone- he just wouldn't let Mr. Mooney rest in peace."
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
Page 152
"it was so hot that the waves of heat rising off the feilds made the mounted soldiers look like a single black carriage lifted from the road..."
a soldier of the great war pg 111
"Papa has seen shattered TV sets lying all over like garbage and tangles of cassette tape hanging in trees, swaying in the autumn breeze like sinister wreaths."
[Latifa My Forbidden Face Pg.35]
“You put the film up on the viewing box in the hallway and pointed with the eraser end of his pencil to the pictures of Baba’s cancer, like a cop showing mug shot of the killers to the victim’s family.”
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
p. 158
"Dad told us we were having something special for dessert, a flaming ice cream cake. The waiter wheeled out a tray with cake on it. The flames ahd a slow, watery movement. Rolling up into the air like ribbons."
The Glass Castle
"He could taste the sunlight. It had a rusty, metallic flavor, like nails on his tongue." (pg 107)
-In The Lake of The Woods by Tim O'Brien
“In China, everybody dreamed about Kweilin. . . When I saw the hills, I laughed and shuddered at the same time. The peaks looked like giant fried fish heads trying to jump out of a vat of oil.”
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (Page 21)
“But some things I can remember very clearly: the heaviness of her hair, the firmness of her hand when she held mine, the way she could peel an apple all in one long curly piece so that it lay in my hand like a flat yellow snake.”
Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife (Page 88)
"All the anger whistles out of me like I'm a popped balloon."
Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
p. 74
Oh yes, I wanted the card. I took it, palming it like an ace of spades, knowing it was a memento that I pin up on my bulletin board.
The Pleasure of my Company by Steve Martin pg. 21
I almost recognized the melody, but I could not be sure; it slipped like a cool and silken wind from my grasp.
The Chosen - Chaim Potok (118)
"... I'm practically willing Ann to let her voice fly. Sing, Ann. Come on!" "... It's like a bird leaving the nest,soaring high and free..."
Author:Libba Bray pg(325)
But it takes me a long time to realize that I'm the one who has receded. It takes me a long time to make my way beyond my lie, and it's like being caught in a dream, going around and around, replaying the same scene until i get it right.
A Gracious Plenty - Sheri Reynolds (124)
"Her power was the sucking kind that takes your good sense and leaves you limp like an old zombie." Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons page 68
"A girl is like a young tree...You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is only way to grow strong and straight." (Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, page 191)
The Things they Carried Tim O'brien
"He was a witness,like God, or like the Gods,Who look in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them."
"Nell Hawkin's eyes seem to see me for the first time. Her voice is high and scratchy as tree braches knocking against a pane in the wind."
Libba Bray,"Rebel Angels"(page 234)
"My fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of pretty decent small-town softball players who'd bribed their way into the World Series."
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
"She could make out the minarets in the distance, like the dusty fingers of giants...."
(p. 27 A Thousand Splendid Suns)
"Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes it shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore"
-ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Their Eyes Were Watching God (p. 191)
And i loved our life, the longs stretches of tedium and small pleasures that marked most of our time together. Our life was like a connect-the-dots drawing, and those were the lines, the bad things only the haphazard arrangement of dots they connected.
Anna Quindler- Black and Blue pg.99
"When he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty inside, nothing more than an involucre, like the slough of certain insects which one finds on the banks of swamps, held by a thread to the stones and shaken by the wind."
Pg. 42
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
The question hit me like a hammer between the eyes. I felt the color drain from my face. My legs went cold. Numb.
-from Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (page 281)
"Like a stone the foreign word falls to the bottom of every soul."
Pg.63
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
"Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction."
Primo Levi, Survival in Aushwitz pg. 7
The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.
The Bourne Identity, page 7
"Prior to the Clutter mystery, the four cases cited were the sum of Dewey's experience with murder, and measured against the case confronting him, were as squalls preceding a hurricane." -pg 152
Truman Capote, "In Cold Blood"
"I can't say my charm was at full throttle when I strolled by Elizabeth, but had she been at the other end of the street, so that I was walking eastward with the sun behind me, squintless and relaxed and perhaps in dusky silhouette, my own charisma would have swirled out of me like smoke from a hookah." (page 30)
"There were four curbs in all and each step down was like the dunking of a Salem witch." (page 164)
-Both from The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
So now I only ran in my dreams. In them, there was always something awful about to happen, or there was something I'd forgotten, and my legs felt like jelly, not strong enough to hold me. Whatever else varied, the ending was the same, a finish line i could never reach, no matter how many miles i put behind me.
Sarah Dessen- the Truth About Forever
pg. 42
"Mommy put us to bed each night like slabs of meat, laying us out three and four to a bed, one with his head to the headboard, the next with his feet to the headboard, and so on."
The Color of Water by James McBride pg. 10
"As they walked in daylight or under the stars, they felt as if they were scrambling along the top of a wall so high that the towns of Italy, glittering below them in the warm summer air, were places in a children's book or a fairy tale."
A Soldier of the Great War (pg. 782)
"There was a thing in Dad's voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight patterns, made the ear want to follow the mind's eye to see."
Ray Bradbury- Something Wicked This Way Comes- pg.36
"From the moment i picked it up out of its nest of wet blanket, it attached itself to me by its little hands like roots sucking on dry dirt."
Barbara Kingsolver- The Bean Trees- pg.29
"Mr. Freeman is ugly. Big old grasshopper body. like a stilt-walking circs guy. Nose like a credit card sunk between his eyes."
Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, pg.10
"One half of my face ws shut like a salted snail, while the other half was held open in an attempt to see." (page 16)
Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterman
Jace flung the dagger. It struck the demon's bony rib cage and stuck there. The demon barely seemed to notice; it only kept moving, inexonerable as death.
City of Ashes-Cassandra Clare
pg 354-5
The other one was pg 190, I forgot to put it on there.
"It was funny because although he turned white and was out, his legs kept going, like he was racing someone across the bridge."
pg.152
Rudolfo A. Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima
"a handkerchief, an old letter, the photo of a cherished person. These things are part of us, almost like limbs on our body."
(Primo Levi Survival in Auschwitz, pg 262)
"Revulsion and fury rose in him like vomit." (page 27)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
The blind inmates advanced like archangels surrounded by their own splendor, they thudded into the obstacle with their weapons upright as they had been instructed but the beds did not move, no doubt the strength of this brave vanguard was not much greater than that of the weaklings who came behind and by now could scarcely hold their lances, like someone who carried a cross on his back and now has to wait to be raised up on it.
Blindness
Jose Saramago
Page 205
If Kyle was dead, she would know it. She would feel it deep down, and the feeling would be tangilbe, like getting hit in the stomach. Maybe they had a special connection, maybe all mothers shared it with their children.
The Rescue
Nicholas Sparks
Page 63
"...the head of each was completely encased in cotton, a swollen cocoon twice the size of an ordinary blown-up balloon, and the cotton, because it had been sprayed with a glossy substance, twinkled like Christmas-tree snow."
Truman Capote-In Cold Blood-pg.95
"I heard Danny take a sudden loud breath, as if he had been punched in the stomach."
-Chaim Potok's The Chosen, page 169-170
"Slicing across the main altar itself, the line looked to Silas like a slash wound across a beautiful face." (Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Page 113)
"There's nothing to see but whirling quickness and a hint of something else, a baby spinning in the mass, leaning out from it to wave, and spinning around again, like a globe, his dark hair flying off like wheat in wind."
A Gracious Plenty
Sheri Reynolds
Pg. 196
"Tears are streaking down her cheeks. I put my arms around her, and she's back, my wife, Clare, safe and sound, on the shore at last after the shipwreck, weeping like a little girl whose mother is waving to her from the deck of the fondering boat."
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
(page 342)
If someone like Pete Schoening was the equivalent of a major-league baseball star, my fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of pretty decent small-town softball players who’d bribed their way into the World Series.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer pg.92
Gran hadn't changed that much;her face looked just the same as I remembered it. The skin was soft and withered, bent into a thousand tiny creases that clung gently to the bone underneath. Like a dried apricot,but with a puff of thick white hair standing out in a cloud around it.
"It was my fourteenth birthday, and I took to waitressing like a hungry trucker tackles a tbone."
Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer, p. 2
"His father was stubborn, just as he was, and had feelings like the bristles of a brush that scraped anyone who came too close." Romiette and Julio by Sharen Draper page 169
Being om the middle is like being invisible.
-Sister's Club
The reef looked like a red sand castle.
-Goosebumps: Deep Trouble
The monster's shadow passed in front of the shop. I could smell the thing - a sickening combination of wet sheep wool and rotten meat ant that wierd sour body odor only mosters have, like a skunk that's been living off Mexican food.
-Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters
In the half-light the big empty rooms they passed through on thier way to the roof looked as deserted as stage sets, the white-draped furniture looming up out of the dimness like icebergs through fog.
-City of Bones
"The town hall stood like a giant ham-fisted youth, too big for his age." p. 169
"He had his first bout (fistfight)when he was eleven years old and skinny as a whittled broom handle."
p. 187
"When Max heard the news, his body felt like it was being screwed up into a ball, like a page littered with mistakes." p. 194
-all from The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
"The jar in her hand seemed to glow orange, as if there were an unearthly fire inside it. There was a faint sound like a cross between a distant scream and the buzz of a hive of disgruntled bees."
The Pig Scrolls, page 60 by Paul Shipton
"Sibyl peeked inside the hut. It provided some shelter from the wind, which was as bitter as an unripe lemon with an attitude problem."
~The Pig Scrolls by Paul Shipton-- page 69
"I popped my head around the door, his brown hair was still long and straggly, but at least it no longer looked like a weekend getaway for an assortment of minibeasts."
~The Pig Scrolls by Paul Shipton page 71
"It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears."
"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker
"My friend is as honest as a mirror." John Shors, Benmeath a Marble Sky, page 7
"When Dad came down from his room, he found me sitting in the middle of a sea of splintered wood and snapped strings, like a boat carrying music had crashed on a rocky shore."
Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, pg. 346
"His face was pure white, as if his mother had powdered her baby on the wrong end." (page 54)
In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, by Bette Bao Lord
"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."
— Raymond Chandler
strike three took dead aim at the kids knees, and here was the kid, swooping back and at the same time swatting at the ball like a golfer teeing off.
manic magee pg 25!!!!!
His nostrals flared, he was breathing like a picadored bull.
Maniak Magee p.24 and 25
"There was a time when she'd been as thin as a heated strand of blown glass." Nicholas Sparks "Safe Haven" (69)
"Guilt radiated off him like heat off the sun."
Marley: A Dog Like No Other p.49
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